High-speed packet-based communications networks are known in the art. These communication networks are experiencing rapidly increasing growth in capacity. This capacity growth is reflected by individual channel data rates scaling from 10 Gbps (gigabits per second), to 40 Gbps, to developing 100 Gbps, and to future projections of 1000 Gbps channels and higher. The capacity growth is also reflected in rapidly increasing overall traffic carried within such networks which can be measured in hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes over a very short period of time.
In network analysis of such high-speed communications networks, large amounts of data will be seen by a network analyzer. Heretofore, the approach in network monitoring and analysis has been to save all traffic (i.e., data packets) that a monitoring device sees, irrespective of packet properties, and later sift through the stored data for analysis and retrieval purposes. This makes the process of retrieving packets which meet specified criteria very costly and time consuming.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide an efficient packet retrieval solution for high-speed packet-based communications networks.